Bartolo di Fredi

Bartolo di Fredi (also recorded as Bartolo Battiloro and Bartolo di Fredi Cini) was born in Siena around 1330. He is first documented in 1353 sharing a workshop with the painter Andrea Vanni, and he registered in the Siena painters' guild in 1355. No school, apprenticeship record, or degree survives beyond this guild registration, consistent with the workshop-based training typical of Trecento Siena. Over roughly five decades he built one of the most active painting shops in the city, producing altarpieces, panel paintings, and large fresco cycles for churches in Siena and in neighboring towns including San Gimignano, Montalcino, Volterra, and Perugia.

His best-documented public commission is the 1367 fresco cycle of Old Testament scenes in the Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta in San Gimignano. Later major works include the 1388 Coronation of the Virgin triptych, now held by the Museo Civico e Diocesano d'Arte Sacra in Montalcino, and several versions of the Adoration of the Magi, one of which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Robert Lehman Collection. His son, the painter Andrea di Bartolo, carried forward his workshop's compositions after him. Bartolo di Fredi died in Siena on 26 January 1410 and, according to art-historical sources, was buried in the cloister of the convent of San Domenico in Siena.

Modern museum scholarship treats Bartolo di Fredi as a central figure of the Sienese Trecento. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalogue entry for his Adoration of the Magi states that he "was the most important painter in Siena in the second half of the fourteenth century." His reconstructed Adoration of the Magi altarpiece, with panels now dispersed among several collections, was the subject of a dedicated exhibition, "The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed," at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York and the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in 2012 and 2013. He remains a regular presence in surveys of early Italian painting, including "Medieval | Renaissance: A Dialogue on Early Italian Painting" at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, running 2025 to 2026. No modern-era awards or honors apply to a painter of this period; his standing rests entirely on museum, archival, and scholarly recognition.

As a historical painter who died in 1410, Bartolo di Fredi has no gallery or estate representation; his works reach the market through auction houses and Old Master dealers rather than a primary gallery system. A confirmed all-time auction record, with a fully verified work, price, house, and sale date, could not be established from the sources reviewed; auction catalogue listings for panels attributed to him typically show estimates rather than published realized prices. Per HENI's market data, cumulative auction sales for the artist total roughly USD 2.27 million, including about USD 610,200 in sales in the two years to May 2026, though this is an aggregate figure rather than a single confirmed record sale. Public sales of his work are infrequent, since the great majority of his surviving oeuvre sits in museum and church collections rather than in private hands.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Bartolo di Fredi, and no certificate program of any kind exists for a painter of this period. Attribution rests on Sienese guild and workshop archival records together with stylistic comparison to signed, dated panels, and it is judged by Old Master specialists and museum curators rather than by any modern authentication body. Because most of his surviving output sits in institutional and church collections, works reaching the open market are rare, published realized prices are inconsistently available, and no single sale can currently be confirmed as the artist's outright auction record. Collectors should also expect variant names in cataloguing, including Bartolo di Fredi Cini and Bartolo Battiloro, along with workshop or "circle of" attributions for pieces not fully in his own hand.